Fable 2 is a game by Microsoft, and it follows a pattern that should be eerily familiar to anyone who is familiar with Microsoft products: It's good enough for lots of people to like it, but not great when you get right down to it. If you can ignore some fairly annoying flaws, you'll have a lot of fun with it. If you're the kind of person who gets annoyed at not being able to see enemies or not knowing how many hit point you have, there's plenty of other games out there.

Ok, I'm going to get the complaints out of the way FIRST, since they really bother me and I know some of them are ridiculous. There are 4 things that identify the game as a Microsoft product:
1) The manual is worthless, it doesn't explain even the most basic actions properly, and leaves out a lot of the description of game mechanics. The actions it does explain aren't available until dozens of hours in. It reads like a marketing brochure.
2) "Exit Without Saving" is found under the "Save" menu, a phenomenon familiar to anyone who has tried to turn off a computer by clicking "start."
3) There are chests scattered throughout the game which, when opened, don't give you treasure. They instead chastise you for not buying the special edition. Again, the marketing department was apparently in charge of at least a few months' of development time.
4) This is the grand master of them all: There's no "Hit Points" statistic. You HAVE hit points, and they are tracked internally. There's a hit point bar, and the game tells you when you're about to die. You have potions that heal anywhere between 20 and 800 hit points. But without knowing how many hit points you have, you're stuck guessing. They tell you every other number, including hot fat you are, but somehow forgot to tell you how many hit points you have.

Now, as for reviewing it as a game instead of an ironic commentary on Microsoft's development practice...

The controls are sluggish. Controlling the character on foot is horribly frustrating, and when I first played I thought that there was something wrong with my Xbox, that's how slow the response time is. Plus, you can't change direction instantly like you can in most games. Everything takes a rounded approach, so instead of turning around your character executes a slow, tight circle in one direction or another. Not only does it take an extra second, but you end up slightly to the side of where you wanted to be. You get used to it, and you start thinking in circles instead of straight lines, but it's annoying.

The combat is a little iffy as well. The controller is over simplified, with one button for melee, one for ranged, and one for magic. This would be ok, and it IS ok at first, but as you progress through the game, X becomes "attack, block, power attack", Y becomes "Shoot, aim, zoom" and B becomes "Magic, charge level 2[, charge levels 3-5]." It would have been easier to force the user to use the unused LB to switch weapons, then have a "regular attack," "special attack," and "magic" button. Now, the charged attacks take a long time to charge up, which would be fine if you had 3 henchmen, but you don't. There's only you, surrounded by a dozen enemies, attempting to charge up a 3 second Fire spell so you don't lose an unspecified number of hit points from your unspecified hit point total.

The whole game has this overly slow and poorly designed. Taking a potion from your inventory immediately drops you back into the action as if you had unpaused, which means that you can forget about taking a large number of weak potions during combat to heal yourself. Also, entering the pause menu can sometimes take 2-3 seconds, as can moving between menu items.

There's also no map in the game. There are small birds-eye-view maps of the towns you're in, peppered with dozens of "merchant" icons, but they only give you a very basic idea of what's going on, and there's no way to zoom them or figure out which merchant is which. You spend an inordinate amount of time wandering a town trying to find the blacksmith.

Instead of a map and a compass, Fable 2 has a glowing yellow trail that you follow. Wherever you're standing, it shoots off along the path taking you on a sometimes roundabout route to your next objective. What sucks is that it discourages exploration in a game where exploration is everything (since there's no map). Most other reviews you'll see mention that you can run right past objectives, treasures, and people without even noticing them, so intent are you on following the line. Even knowing this, I still walked right past chests and stuff without realizing it. Thankfully my dog saved me.

The dog is probably the best part of the game, in terms of pure academic gameplay design. You have a dog, who helps you in almost every situation. When you're dancing to impress a woman, the dog dances with you. When you knock an enemy to the ground, the dog pounces on him and tears him to pieces. When you're running through the forest and you run right past a chest, your dog barks and points you back to the treasure. I wish I had a dog like that in every game!

As a game on its own, Fable 2 is pretty good. I know I had a lot of complaints, but if you can build a time-delay into your brain's expectations and you get used to the combat controls, it really isn't all that bad. The magic spells are mostly pretty awesome, and the "pay for play" style of experience gathering really helps you feel like you've accomplished something. You only get experience based on the skill you used in that particular combat, so if you only used your sword you get melee experience plus generic experience. You also get experience bonuses based on how much ass you kicked. If you killed 15 guys with 15 swings, you can get up to 4 times the experience. The storyline is good and engaging, and the whole thing seems well conceived, but rushed out the door.

All in all, it's a decent game. There's better games out there, even for the Xbox, but if you're into simple game mechanics and almost cutesy gameplay I would go for Fable. It's not for children, however, despite the looks and some of the reviews. There's no language, and no blood, but any game that gives you a menu choice whether or not to use a condom with your hooker is probably not mom-friendly. If you have been reading reviews of Fable and been on the fence about it, wishing it were deeper and more complex, go with Oblivion instead.